


A Different Kind of Guilt

by wombat713writes



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Attempted Sexual Assault, Dean Winchester is Claire Novak's Parent, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt Claire Novak, Hurt/Comfort, Kaia and Claire are together however it's not explicitly romantic so i just put implied, Most of those characters are just referenced; the only ones actually in person are claire and dean, POV Claire Novak, also know in my head cas and dean are together but even less implied so, but so is Jody! and Cas! she's got three parents ok, did all that writing before I remembered>, sort of? but it's VERY light. basically Claire just punches out a creep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:40:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29664654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wombat713writes/pseuds/wombat713writes
Summary: Kaia's dead and Claire's not dealing as well as she wants everyone to think. After a hunt gone wrong brings up more emotions and guilt than she can handle, she decides to drink them away. Dean, who's done that more times than he can count, finds her, and they have a talk.
Relationships: Claire Novak & Dean Winchester, Implied Kaia Nieves/Claire Novak
Comments: 2
Kudos: 35





	A Different Kind of Guilt

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is my first Supernatural fic! I absolutely love Claire, she's my favorite and also I may project a bit 🙄... anyways. Claire and Dean's dynamic on the show is the best and it was a crime that they didn't get more time together. Honestly it's a crime that we didn't get more Claire in general.
> 
> I've been wanting to do a series/a 5+ 1 for a while where Dean helps his family with drinking (the +1 would be them helping him, ofc), so there may be more to follow if this does well, but I'm shit at committing to things so don't get your hopes up. Also-- this has not been beta read or even really edited by me so comment if you see something and be kind haha
> 
> That's all, enjoy!

Claire had been doing ok. The beer in her hand now—her second of the past couple hours—was no indication of how she _had_ been, in the not too distant past. Really, she had been ok.  


After Kaia had— after everything that happened with Kaia, she’d decided to stick around Jody’s for a while. She didn’t go back to school, and Jody didn’t try to make her, trying to be sensitive, but she’d been careful on hunts, and let Jody back her up sometimes. She had friends now, in Patience and Alex, and something like a mom in Jody and Donna.  


Her relationship with Castiel was even normal now, as normal as your relationship with an angel possessing your father’s corpse could be; they talked at least once a week, so they both knew the other was safe, and sometimes he sent her music recommendations. She wasn’t really into Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, but she never said anything. Sometimes she even sent him a song or two back, and if her taste was a little too punk for him, he never said anything either.  


Anyways— she’d been doing ok. Until this case, this stupid fucking case. A ghost had been killing kids with seemingly no pattern at a high school. It took three dead kids before Claire had put it together: they had all come forward about a boy who had been sexually assaulting girls on campus. He committed suicide, but apparently stuck around to take his revenge on the girls he blamed for it. It was a _stupidly_ obvious pattern; she shouldn’t have realized it sooner— would have, if she hadn’t been exhausted from the last hunt (ok, so maybe she hadn’t been being as careful as she said, but it wasn’t like it had mattered. She could work just fine on four hours of sleep. Until she couldn’t). She got the last girl who had reported him to the school, Rachel Bishop, and drove out to his grave to burn the body. She told the girl she would be safe.  


_I’ll protect you._  


Like that ever works. Claire scoffed, downing the last of the beer from her glass. She needed something harder. She didn’t usually drink, but the bar was dark and seedy and the bartender hadn’t even asked her for an ID. And she needed a drink, ok? She needed to be a little bit numb. A bit more. She waved the bartender down again.  


“A whiskey? Neat,” she shouted over the growling indiscernible noise from the speakers that was probably supposed to be music. She had enough money to black this night out.  


The man behind the bar barely looked at her as he poured whiskey into the same glass that had held the beer. She gave him a thin smile and took a big sip. It burned in her throat, full and sharp on the way down and she grimaced. The smile became a bit more genuine. She deserved to feel a bit of pain, deserved it for the promise she made to Rachel, and broke.  


Just like the one she made to Kaia, another lie.  


She had squeezed gasoline over the whole body, dropped in a thick match, and set the corpse up in flames. It should have been done there, and she thought it was, but she assumed they were clear too soon, and as she turned back to Rachel, the girl was flung across the cemetery, her head cracking against a headstone. She slid to the ground, a bloody smear trailing from the back of her head on the engraved marble. Her hand, which had been clutching a flashlight, went limp, and all Claire could do was stare in horror. All she could see was Kaia’s hand, going limp, her own slipping from it.  


And then the ghost had appeared in front of her, and _then_ she had seen the family headstone. A little box, secured to the base of it with initials carved into it, and one of them was his. She cocked the shotgun and fired into the boy, and then turned and fired into the box. Again, a third time, and it cracked open, plastic baggies with little rings spilling out. She struck a match and set the rings on fire.  


The ghost burned away in a flash of fire, and Claire stood still. She swayed a bit, hands shaking on the shotgun. A family ring as a tether, not just the body. _Fuck._ She had forced herself to Rachel’s side, even though she knew there was no way she could have survived that head wound. And she was right: no pulse.  
After that, the night was a blur. She knew she’d been supposed to meet up with Jody the next morning if the hunt was still on, and call if she solved it before then, but all she could think to do was leave. Her bag was quick to pack back at the motel. She’d thrown it in the back seat and hit the gas hard on the way out of town. She just had to get out of the town, as far away.  


Sometime around dawn, the adrenaline all drained from her body, and a night of hunting and driving caught up to her, and she pulled off the highway, turned off the car, and fell asleep with her jacket pulled up over her shoulders, propped up sitting against the window. When she woke up, it took all of two minutes for the memories of the night before and the guilt to crawl back. And now, somehow, she’d ended up here.  


Finishing the glass of whiskey, she went to call for another, when suddenly a man slid into the seat next to her, leaning onto the bar heavily. He was tall, but skinny, maybe fourty, forty-five, and she thought she could easily take him if she had to. Hunting was training her to do that; size someone up in seconds, determine what level threat they were. This man, not too high.  


“You look like you’re having a bad night. Can I buy you a drink?”  


She gave him a look, her best fuck off face, but he just grinned and leaned a bit closer. His breath stank. Actually, grinning gave the impression of happiness, a broad, toothy smile. Whatever this man was doing could be more accurately described as leering. Fine.  


“Another?” she shouted at the bartender. “It’s on him.”  


The bartender filled up her glass, and the greasy man’s beside her.  


“So, what’s a pretty girl like you doing at a place like this?” the man asked.  


She didn’t respond, just tilting the glass up, tipping the liquor down her throat. He watched her swallow with slitted eyes.  


“I asked you a question, girly.”  


He leaned closer, snaking an arm around her shoulders, dangling fingers reaching down, down— and she grabbed his hand, crushing it. She twisted his arm and slammed it into the bar. “Learn consent, asshole.”  


The man yelped, jerking his hand back, and cradling it against his chest. “I was just being nice!”  


“You nice to everyone, or just the teenage girls?”  


His eyes darkened. “There’s nothing wrong with liking ‘em young.”  


Maybe it was being drunk, or maybe she just wanted an excuse to fight, but either way, he’d just given her one. He barely had time to finish talking before her fist was slamming into his jaw. He brought a clumsy swing of his own up, but she ducked, and kicked him in the balls. He screamed and staggered back, clutching between his legs.  
People were starting to look now; even in a place like this, a full out brawl wasn’t everyday. He wasn’t fighting back, not really, but he’d already done more than enough. She caught his jaw again, then his brow, and then he was falling back into a table, tripping and landing on his back, and she was going down beside him, crouching and swinging, again, and again. His hands were limp on the ground and his lip was cracked and something in his face broke, and his face was bloody and it was her face and she was beating herself.  


It wasn’t until a hand caught her shoulder, and physically hauled her off of him that she realized someone had been calling her name.  


“Claire- Claire— stop, Claire!”  


She swung around, fists ready to start on the next target, to see Dean, his hands raised, staring at her with what looked like, through the blur of alcohol and tears— goddammit, when did she start crying— worry. She took a step back, swaying a bit, and squinted at him.  


“What the hell are you doing here?”  


He smiled grimly. “You didn’t show for breakfast with Jody and you haven’t been answering your phone, so she went to check out the town anyway, and found another dead girl and no sign of you. She put out a hunter APB.”  


Right. Breakfast with Jody. That’s why her phone had been ringing. (She’d put it on silent after the first hour or so of calls) “How did you know where I was?”  
“Marshall there’s a hunter who owes me a favor from a couple years back. Gave me a call back about a blonde girl in leather showing up at a dive bar.” He gestured to a burly man at a table nearby.  


Marshall waved. “I applaud your work with Tom there. If there was ever a man who deserved to get beat down…”  


Dean looked at Claire. “Do I need to know?”  


She crossed her arms, suddenly feeling embarrassed. Not about the man— Tom— he’d deserved it, but about the drinking, about skipping breakfast with Jody, about turning her phone off, about the way she knew she was swaying right now.  


“I’m gonna take that as a no.” He looked her up and down and grimaced. “You look like hell. C’mon, I’m gonna drive you back to Jody’s.”  


She let him wind and arm around her back, supporting her as they walked out. Maybe she didn’t really need it, but the heavy pressure felt like a hug, and her throat constricted at the sensation in a good way, so she didn’t say anything. They walked quietly for a while, and she sensed he was saying nothing to let her speak. They rounded the corner of the block, and she finally spoke.

“I didn’t know what it felt like before.”  


“What?”  


“The guilt. The way you feel, I didn’t get it, not really. I mean, I’d let people down, but never like this before.”  


“The ghost hunt? Jody said you’ve been working yourself to the bones, you should cut yourself some slack.”  


“Yeah, well ‘messing up’ doesn’t equal four dead girls in other people’s jobs. Besides, it’s not just that. It’s…” _Kaia._ “To promise someone they’ll be safe, and then have them die— die because of me? It’s a different kind of guilt, you know?”  


Dean looked down at her, his mouth a hard line.  


“Yeah, I know,” he said softly.  


“I mean I’ve always felt… guilty, I guess, about my mom leaving. I mean, let’s face it, she would never have gotten that low if I could have been better.” Claire broke off and gritted her teeth. It was a snarl, almost at herself. Stupid. She would never say stuff like this if she was sober; maybe drinking had its disadvantages too.  


“C’mon. That’s not— your mom made her own choices. You were just a kid.”  


“No—no!” They’d reached the Impala now, and they came to a stop. She pulled away from Dean, who let her go, but kept his hands hovering nearby in case she fell.  
“It _was_ my fault, it was _me_. I do that. I hurt people. People near me just… die. Dad could have gotten out back then when Cas was in my body but he didn’t, and now he’s dead. That’s on me. And then mom left, and then she got kidnapped, and I was bratty and mad at her instead of looking for her, and she was tortured, all those years, because of me. And then… and then Kaia.”  


“Claire—”  


“I told her I would protect her!” Claire shouted. At some point she’d started crying, the eyeliner smudged into the dark circles under her eyes. “I said she would be safe, and she wouldn’t have gone back into that world if it weren’t for me. So that— that’s on me too. She’s dead, and it’s because of me!”  


“And then Rebecca, and. And I told her I would protect her too, Dean.” She was almost pleading. _Tell me, tell me I did the wrong thing. Yell at me. Hate me for it, as much as I hate myself for it._ “Same as I told Kaia, should’ve known better, and then that ghost killed her, because I wasn’t paying enough attention.”  


“Kaia’s death is not your fault. And Rebecca— sometimes things get fucked up on hunts. Just cause you missed a detail, that don’t make you a bad person.”  


“No, but it makes me a bad hunter. And if I’m not good at hunting, what am I good at? What am I good for?”  


“Claire, you’re not just a hunter. You’re, you’re a student, and a friend, and a daughter, to Jody, and to Cas, and… to me.”  


“Yeah and a lot of good I’ve done for any of you. All I do is drag everyone into my little pile of crap. You’d be happier without any of this—” she gestured to her body with a shaky hand— “to deal with.”  


“That’s crap.”  


She laughed sharply, cutting him off. “Yeah, right. Just admit it! I don’t mind. I can handle it, I’m a big girl, promise. I fuck up everything and everyone I touch, and maybe I’m not a bad person, but I’m certainly not a good one either.”  


“Listen, I don’t care if you’re a good person. Maybe you, you screw up sometimes. Everyone does sometimes, and if we’re honest, comparing screw ups, I think I got you beat, but a good margin.”  


Claire crossed her arms and sniffed, forcing back the tears that kept rising up to her eyes. Stupid alcohol.  


“Thing is, if we counted up every bad thing we did and laid them all out, none of us would look too pretty. But you do a lot of good, and I don’t just mean saving lives. Sometimes I go into the kitchen of the bunker in the morning, and Cas is listening to a song you sent him, and he’s smiling like someone just gave him a puppy or something. You mean a lot to a lot of people. I include myself in that. We don’t want you to stick around cause you’re good at ganking monsters, or cause you’re some morally pure beacon of sunshine, we want you around cause you’re you. And that’s it.”  


And dammit. Dammit, but the tears were coming back up again. The burning guilt and need to have someone scream at her, punch her, had diminished somewhat, and the alcohol felt heavy in her stomach now, dragging on her like it wanted her to fall over right there. She smudged tears from her eyes with the heels of her hands.  
“Ok?” Dean asked, ducking his head to catch her eyes.  


She lifted them, looked into his eyes, and saw honesty reflected back at her. He meant every word he’d said, and he wanted to make sure she knew. She also saw pain, and guilt, and… maybe that one was love. She nodded.  


"Ok." 

“Great.”  


She turned towards the Impala and he held up a hand. “No, actually, one more thing.”  


Claire turned back to him.  


“You can’t do this when things get bad.”  


“What?”  


“This—” he gestured to the bar, and her bloody fists. “I know it seems like it’s gonna help, trust me, I know, and if anyone has a right to drink, it’s us, but drinking isn’t the way you deal with all the crap from this job.”  


“I don’t do it all the time,” Claire started, rolling her eyes.  


“Hey— Claire, I’m serious. Look, do what Sam does. Go for a run, get yourself a self-help book, or something.”  


“What, like you do that when things get bad? I’ll be fine.” She spoke flippantly; deflecting.  


“The last person you want to imitate when it comes to stuff like this, is me.”  


She scoffed.  


“No, listen. I’m not joking with this, ok? Listen to me. Drinking is good for about as long as you’re actively doing it. You get a couple hours, a day off from feeling. And the next day you wake up with a helluva headache, and a pile of new crap to deal with that you did the night before, when you were drunk. And speaking from experience, it sucks in the long term too. You start drinking too young, and it fucks you up for life.”  


Claire nodded, reluctantly. “Fine. No more black-out nights.”  


“Get a dependency on protein shakes, or bullet journaling, or set your hands at a punching bag.” He paused. “Or, you know, you can call me, when you feel like this, if you wanna talk about something.”  


She smiled. _Thank you._ “Softie.”  


Dean grinned. “Shut up.”  


“Sure you don’t want to Dr. Phil a bit more?”  


“Get in the car, kid.”  


She giggled, or snorted— the giggle she would definitely put down to alcohol if asked about it the next day, and slid into shotgun.  


She hadn’t been doing well. Really hadn’t been fully ok since elementary school, definitely not since Kaia died. But she had a family again, now, and they cared about her because of who she was fuck ups and all. Maybe, maybe she could be ok. Maybe, someday, she could get there.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear reader who actually read my writing... I love you! mwah!
> 
> If you want to ask me questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below or ask me on tumblr at [understarryskieswearelost](https://understarryskieswearelost.tumblr.com/). Also on Tumblr-- me being a geek and an idiot... posts and reblogs about supernatural (especially claire ^_^)... I gush and I complain.
> 
> [Here](https://understarryskieswearelost.tumblr.com/post/643957603471409152/a-different-kind-of-guilt) is a rebloggable version on tumblr.
> 
> If you liked the fic or have constructive criticism, please comment!
> 
> As always-- Reads make me smile, Kudos make me jump up and down and Comments knock me to the ground. Seriously. I pass out.
> 
> (it's a good thing. comment :)


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